How to get traffic from StumbleUpon: Tips for 1 million visits

What's the secret to getting lots of daily Stumbleupon traffic? Well, there's the obvious, content must be up to a certain standard to go "viral," and there's the not-so-obvious, you have to pay for Stumbleupon visitors, at least initially.

My Experience

When you have a successful page on Stumbleupon, you'll find you get an initial high spike in traffic, and then it'll drop down to a daily level depending on the page (it could be 20 visits a day, 100, 500, or 1000). With several successful pages this daily traffic can quickly add up, and you may also find that from time-to-time you get more spikes for the same page.

My most successful page has had 435k visits since July 2013 (It's March 2015 right now), and I've a few pages like that. On a daily basis my site gets about 1,000 - 2,000 views from Stumble.


16% of viewers liked the page (443K Views with 71K Likes).

How does Stumble work?

Stumbleupon is an app where users press a stumble button to receive an algorithmically determined "random" page. The users then "thumb" or "like" pages. The more likes a page receives the more users it will then be shown to. A viral page will have a high ratio of "likes" to views. Therefore, to have a successful page means having a page that appeals to a large number of stumblers. Occasionally niche pages will do very well, but personally I've had greater success with pages that appeal to a general audience, although it is often hard to predict.

Do your research

If you're trying to master stumble, it's wise to explore the app and examine pages that have been successful. Personally, I found quite a mix, and I was surprised that often pages with awful style would rank highly based on the quality and relevance of their content alone (and perhaps due to faster page loading times due to site simplicity). You'll notice that page titles often seem to be very important. Explaining what makes quality content and a great page title is beyond this short article, but you can find plenty of information on that elsewhere.

Just to be clear - a snappy title and great content that appeals to general users are essential.

Page speed tips

The StumbleUpon app often seems to load pages more slowly than they usually load; therefore, if you want to improve your "likes" to views ratio, make sure your pages are extremely quick loading to compensate. Stumble users are browsing pages quickly and you often only have a short window of time to grab their attention. Make sure this short window isn't wasted with a prolonged loading time. Check out webpagetest.org and Google's PageSpeed Insights for advice on improving your page load times.

Going viral

Now here's the real secret - you're going to have to pay. I've had great success this way, and great consistency. Just posting your page on Stumble isn't going to do it, or it's at least extremely unlikely.

The good news: paying for Stumble traffic vs paying for Google traffic

When you pay for Google traffic you pay for each visitor to your site, but with Stumbleupon you pay for a visitor, but if that visitor "likes" your page, Stumble will then show the page to other stumblers, per their algorithm. You pay to get the ball rolling, but if the content is good enough it'll continue to roll all by itself.

How much do you have to pay?

I only have experience of working with Stumble on a tight budget. What worked best for me was spending one dollar a day on a page. After about 10 days the page received 100 views. In my experience, by this time you should have some idea if your page is going to get a lot of traffic or not. If you've received no extra likes, the page is probably a Stumble flop. If you've received 10-20 likes, then it's worth putting more money in. However, I've often found that by the time you've paid for 100 views, if the page is good enough, the "likes" should begin to bring in enough traffic and new "likes" to allow you to end the payment campaign for that page.

I don't actually have experience on Stumble with a big budget. It might be possible to make less popular pages viral if you throw enough money at them.

There may also be other spending strategies that work. I've only used the one described above.

Is Stumble traffic worth it?

When a user performs a search on Google they know what they're looking for and Google assists them in finding it. Therefore, when Google refers a user to a page there's a high likelihood that the user will find the page relevant and engaging. Stumble users are, on the other hand, randomly pressing the Stumble button to find entertaining or interesting pages. They aren't looking for anything in particular so it's much harder to engage them. A large amount of stumblers who visit your page will not stay there for long and will not be engaged. This is bad news if your site is monetised. However, I'd say, from my experience, as much as a third of traffic may be reasonably engaged. And you can expect Stumble users to bring you links from blogs, and general social media traffic. Is all of this worth $10 per page? It is if the page is successful. Ultimately, you'll have to experiment and see if it's worth it for your site.